07 April 2009

"Song of Democritus"

Worship is a reef against storms,rough water, unmanageable tides.As fast as the ocean erodes ityou forge new coral from beloved repetition.You've found a single blueprint for survivalthe ritual that cosmologizes ferocious universeinto something small, hard, and shiny:building blocks that fit together neatly.Not that you can ever forget how fragileyour shellcraft is, nor how terrible the packaged forces,when every surface touched too long transmits a tremor.You have heard the stars were falling but you knew it already,the Surgeon-General's warning just confirmed your resolveto leave no dawn-beached body for the gulls to gouge.

02 April 2009

"Colloquy in the High Branches"

3 crows got togetherto decide whether humans were people.First crow said:"They don't know how to stop moving,they must be some kind of insect."Second crow said:"They are oblivious to their surroundings.They are certainly plants."But the third crow said:"Haven't you noticed how they complainat the drop of a stick, about anything and everything?Their breed would remake the world.In that alone, they are like crows."

For what they paid, they might as well get it right.I don't understand. Of all the ones in the class,These quiet, sober, studious young menWith shining eyes seem least the careless type.But time after time, their shoulders hunched at the screensOf simulation, I watch the perilous veer;I see the flashing end of one more sessionGone terribly wrong, & wonder if the languageDifficulty should be held to blame,Or something in my teaching that's unclear.

they are fewer every daythe roaches, since i left them bitter candy.plastic chapels invite them in.then they go back bearing lingering evangel.i never see the corpses;even the ones i smash get carted off& eaten in huggermugger,their way of refusing to concede.i used to say jokingly"don't touch that roach!it might end up the sole survivorfrom a nuclear war, & repopulate the earth."i never spoke to them then.i kind of identifiedwith their secretiveness,their perpetual ineffectual conspiracy.but now i knowthey outnumber us in the cities a hundred to one& hide for play not fear.the news makes them tremble with excitement.perhaps this day will be the daythey get to use their radiation-resistancea thousand times higherthan any other creatureon this provident planet, that foresaw even Raygun.

i almost mourn the roachesnow that they're endangered, just like me--a new kind of poisonis right this moment climbing the food chain,no doubt to be bannedin the year 2000.by which time my liver will have garnered toxic dose.i try to forewarn them,admonish them to live in the present."enjoy while you can,these runaway rice crumbs lodged in the nappy mauve.your days are numbered& your number's up;& soon when i turn on the kitchen lightonly shadows will scatter."

but what of Adam & Evein that soot-shrouded dawning?will only our robots be leftwinding down on distant shores,their telemetry unacknowledged?i keep my journalin an acid-free notebok to last 3 centuries:from somewhere i have wonassurance of no precipitate foreclosure.i don't know why.it started when i quit listening to the news.

When i lick youit is homage to the Goddess.The pleasure flies up your spine,you twist & moan, & the Goddess is well served,but you are not the Goddess.These temple walls have been here longer than the earth;this bed is only given us for an hour.

So we divest of masks,our names, our roles & offices,why we have come, where we will go afterwards,all our mundane identity; & we divestat last, even of the mask of Desire.

Just to belong for a time in the sacred precinct.

As we shudder into sleep, rockingly soothed,immense with ecstatic promises,let it go unremembereduncommemoratedlet it dissolve.We cannot bear this waking knowledgepast a hazy somber longing& mute poignancy...our cicatrized handsblindly seek to clasp of their own volitionas you sit beside me in the cartalking of triple lives & the need for caution.

I will stay, i will learn to live and die in the body, the body's knowing and what it doesn't know. My armor will be that i am flesh without appeal, in the fleetness of its perishing. Here on this island of Easter gull's cry flies forever among the stone faces.

Though she is gone from me & far away,& i have not desired her for awhile,to think in her direction is to weighthe world against a most superior wile...In vain i seek for any other waythan falling in love anew, to lose her smilebut i cannot be free, once brought to trial, though she is gone from me & far away& i have not desired her for awhile.

I never can remember the morning rainso quietly does it become a mood,& thence a land, where all things bent & dismayedby Time's oppression dwell in immaculate ruin.The light indoors seems stronger, though unwell.I wanna/ sit alone & contemplate the tasteof autumn, empire's end, & death; I'd testbounds, if but in parable to wailby a gray shore with the immaterial forms... Usually I have to go somewhere, which formsthe context of this feeling, for the tarnI leave behind, unvisited, its murk& mists & dragging winds lacking my barkto laze there, counterpoise, --begins to churn.

1. The music of the years, too dear for me a candle drowned in its own wax slavery has returned to the world where urge & the Story dovetail

we trade mutable masks, i & the dead one of us has lost the code false phosphorus, indigo on black a skinhead reads me my cards

you're paying too much for entropy i know where you can get much cheaper entropy--lore of the dispossessed enters my body wordlessly, like the chill of a great cathedral.

2. Fathomless answer, the city had assumed its golds & even the undersides of the overpasses were lit. Down the narrow alley stairway four detours on the way there wonder underway, marooned near doom ineluctable return. Railey wept. Silvered by slug trails of joy the hundred-foot statue of Stalin visible from across the Trinity River. The Story into thirteen swans divides; the colors of a bruise are not the sunset's. In napalm i have burned cold orb & bright impoverished kiss, forage five old wolves tarrying at the shadowless duration.

3. Crashsound returns as ingots wasp tattoo of the bronze mortgage graves laid upon graves the weeping statue, righted i keep hearing singing in the walls jarring the gyro through the Hunger Wall an experiment in mixing musics MC 900-foot Earthworm in this former empire without the stained glass House of the Black Mother of God the moment, overly edged salvo of ornaments gargoyle scree can't argue with the cold alone in the Police Museum fenced pit of rubble the basement walls bared to the sky return to a dubious parking place mayor of the besieged town distant birdsong in this bright abyss of air curiously intimate.

4. Or say my Evil Eye had flowered Under a rain of stones on the beach of the lifeless sea from watching fires elapse then flick an ant away reasons the counterclockwise clock conspirators' passageway opened in the tarry afternoon stone forest chess game by a saffron quaver following the wires vegetarians carrying candles of animal fat divvy the gleaming implements ridged to my thumb.

5. Possessing you, why does my time compare captioned victim ore into slag rose vowel interval wall of starfish last night of the Winter King open door, molten road, shoe in the moonlight pointing pointing the ninth candle & these details are things i want to know & what i want to know i have to find orange sparkspray the length of an eyeblink car-tossed cigarette at night the Shrine has vermin.

The map graved in my nomad bloodis a mask or the dance of deathi gather my thingsagain for the long uprootingone with all the homeless onesmillions on every continent without a place to restantheap kicks antheap & the turmoil widens& though this timei know where i'll be goingi am no less the prey of that nomad blooddriven with nothing to followbut my hatredlike a pillar of smoke by day & my fearlike a pillar of fire by night

Quiet friend of farflung furlongs, feelhow more & more your breathing swells the room.Among the rafters of the gloomy belfrylet yourself toll. What takes its life from yougathers to a greatness over this repast.Embrace the transmutation,--there & back.What's your most excruciating practice?Does drinking twist your face? Turn into wine.Be, tonight, out of overplus,wizardry at your senses' intersecting;of their weird conjunction make the sense.Then, when all the homely round forgets,to the sempiternal earth declare: I run.To the rushing waters answer: I remain.